The Untold Link Between Justice Alito and Trump's Election-Denying Efforts

Mark Martin floated fringe theories to keep Trump in power. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito taught with him — even after January 6.
Shawn Musgrave October 3, 2024

On the evening of January 6, 2021, retired North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin had a nine-minute conversation with former President Donald Trump. This call followed weeks of efforts by Martin to find any legal means to keep Trump in power, during which he peddled fringe theories of election fraud and constitutional law to state officials and the Supreme Court. Just 20 days after the insurrection, Martin had another intimate audience with another powerful right-winger: He taught a three-day seminar on constitutional law with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for Regent University Law School in Virginia, where Martin was the dean at the time. This link between a Supreme Court justice and such a close legal adviser to Trump’s Big Lie efforts has not been reported previously, and it adds to mounting questions about Alito’s sympathy for Trump heading into the election.

Despite evidence at the time that Martin was part of the Trump campaign’s legal brain trust and fed Trump radical ideas about the Constitution, Alito taught the three-day seminar with him again in 2022. Martin and Alito did not respond to The Intercept’s questions for this story. “It was and continues to be a shock to the system knowing that the upper echelons of the legal community used their legal talents to subvert the will of the people,” said Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, “and that Supreme Court justices of all people are friends with these individuals.”

Martin’s continued access to Alito even after January 6 also illustrates just how little scrutiny Martin ever faced. While other prominent Trump legal advisers like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani have faced sanctions for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, Martin has never publicly accounted for his role. He’s still a law school dean, now at High Point University, a private university in North Carolina, which also did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about Martin’s relationship with Alito.

Martin remains active in prestigious legal organizations, including the American Law Institute and American Bar Association committees, where he recently sat on a judicial ethics panel and moderated another about election law. He was at the Republican National Convention in July, and a far-right group recently floated Martin as a potential Supreme Court nominee.

Read more: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/03/supreme-court-samuel-alito-law-mark-martin-trump/